Recent reviews by Bertral

TL;DR: Beautiful and fun, but too short for the price.

Visuals and music are great, with the classic homeworld feel including multiple interpretations of Adagio for Strings. Loved how they used some of the original voice actors.

Gameplay is very enjoyable. Take the critics with a grain of salt, some are misinformed. For example, directional damage is still here and most abilities are situational. Minelayers and platforms are useful now, long range sniping is a thing, there's terrain that can be used as cover, etc. Some units seem to be bugged and can't get in range to shoot or don't do what the description says, but that should get quickly patched.

Campaign is too short for the price, so I'd recommend waiting for a discount and playing on hard difficulty (<10 hours) which is still easier than HW1. Only one mission required me to retry multiple times and I enjoyed it a lot. Biggest downside here is the pace that is WAY too fast. You can't prepare for the next mission or collect resources, you can't plan before attacking. You're too often thrown in the middle of the battle and extracted as soon as you complete an objective.

Story isn't good, but the cutscenes are terrible. Heavy focus on cartoonishly animated CGI characters and a villain so cartoonishly evil it's impossible to take seriously. Why they didn't keep the style of HW:DoK (like they did for the HW1/2 recap) is beyond me. There are many plot holes and the entire ending makes no sense.

The roguelike mode is probably what will keep me playing. Endless PvE with the new ships without any of the cringe cutscenes is basically all the strength of this game without the bad parts. It's the first time there's actual replayability in a homeworld game for those who don't pvp.

Remember to stay hydrated ...

I haven't finished it yet and already got my money's worth of enjoyement ... tenfold.

Absolutely not balanced in a good way.